The State of Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

In a parking lot in New Jersey today, I drove a car straight into the tail end of another vehicle at 25 mph, clenched my teeth and waited for my vehicle to stop itself. I was testing out a prototype of General Motors' Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications system, which aims to use wireless data transmission to improve vehicle safety.

The V2V system sends out speed, GPS location and braking info at a 300-yd. maximum range radius from the vehicle—all over a Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) 5.9-Ghz wireless protocol that's similar to 802.11 Wi-Fi. Any other vehicle equipped with a V2V system can receive and process that signal. When vehicles can communicate with each other in this manner, they can perform a variety of neat safety tricks. GM's vehicles at today's demo could perform automatic emergency braking (the situation I described above), offer blind-spot warnings and set off alarms for vehicles approaching you at high speed.

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Regular readers of Popular Mechanics will recognize that similar systems are already on the market from Audi and Volvo (blind-spot detection) and Mercedes (collision avoidance); GM expects its system to be market-ready within five to seven years. So what gives? GM points out that competitive systems use radar and/or laser sensors to monitor the space around the vehicle, and since these sensors are expensive, the company will only offer this sort of safety technology to luxury car buyers for the near future.

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V2V technology, on the other hand, is cheap enough to roll out in Chevy Aveos. There's just one problem: You need a lot of Chevy Aveos with V2V installed to make the system effective. Importantly, if the car I was testing this afternoon was driven at 25 mph into the rear end of a vehicle without V2V, it wouldn't stop itself at all—and would continue to transmit its own speed, GPS and braking (or in this case, non-braking) data into the ether as it plowed into the car in front of it.

Nevertheless, this V2V technology has a future. Since DSRC is an open wireless protocol, other manufacturers are developing it as a communications platform as well. Furthermore, government agencies such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are looking to integrate DSRC into roadway infrastructure (stoplights, traffic-monitoring systems, et cetera) in Vehicle Infrastructure Integration applications, so there will be a lot of momentum around the technology.

There will probably also be privacy concerns. It's only a short hop, skip and jump from V2V safety technology to V2V traffic enforcement and insurance information gathering. There's no more accurate way to nail a driver for speeding than if his car delivered the evidence wirelessly. GM says its system won't transmit vehicle identification information, but that may not be necessary if the roadway infrastructure has cameras installed.